The Girton Poetry Group

Not Averse

[So the moon was there]

So the moon was there, hanging low in the sky.  And it looked just like an orb, or an egg, or an eye.  And it was just sitting there, looking blankly at me, like a globe spinning so fast that all the colours blurred into white.  And I felt sorry for it, because although it sat alone in the watercloured skies, the moon could never be king.  And I was king

 

            You were king?

Yes, I was.  I was there with my crown pulled tightly over my ears, and I was happy, really happy.  I was stood in a forest of pink trees and it would have been perfect, except my skin felt too big for my bones.  It just hung there softly, crumpled at the elbows and knees.  But the moon looked so sad that I stayed there for hours and hours until it began to sink, and I said

 

            Please don’t go!

                      I’ll eat you up,

                                I love you so.

But it didn’t listen, and so I did.

 

            You did what?

I ate it up.

 

            The moon?

Yes.  I just pulled it out of the sky—it’s easier than it sounds—and I swallowed it whole.

 

            What happened to the sky?

Well, the skies became water.  The moon was the only thing keeping the sky in place, you see, because the stars felt so sorry for it.  But once I had swallowed the moon, the stars all smiled and rushed to become bubbles in the waves around my shoulders.  And I was scared that my skin would get soggy and weigh me down.  I was so scared that I could feel a fear trembling and leaping between my synapses.  In all six hundred and forty muscles, and all ten toes.  But the moon saved me—

 

            But you’d already swallowed it.

I know, and that’s how it saved me.  The moon filled the bits of my skin that were too big and suddenly I could fit it again.  And although the skies never really liked the moon, they loved it enough to not let it drown, and so I was safe.  And so I started swimming and swimming, and I swum back to you—wait, don’t kiss me, I’m trying to finish the story.  And I swam back to you, and you’d made me a cup of tea—chamomile tea—because I was cold.  And although you’d been sat there for days and days waiting for me to come back, the tea was still hot.  And so we just sat there, and the trees weren’t pink and the stars couldn’t sing, but we were happy.

 

            Is that the end?

Yes.